Here’s another USB hub from Brando, the company that wants to create a USB hub for every possible situation. This one might just come close, because this four-port hub lets you revolve the upstream port and then one of the receptacles 180° to accommodate USB devices from all directions. We’re not big fans of that goofy-looking starburst design that reminds us of The Dating Game
from the ’60s, but still, for $15 this might solve a problem or two. [Brando]
Here are the top three rigs in the Best Computer Rig Contest. The winner: Steve Larson for his Nebuchadnezzar-like overloaded cockpit. Jump to see the three mega-galleries, which show just how cool the winning rigs are. After seeing all the details, my personal winner is Dlinc. His rig, with Transformers-style, fully-articulated rotatable monitors and keyboards, is absolutely stunning and the most useful of them all.
You knew it would happen: DVRs are finally breaking down the TV ratings system.
Because DVRs make skipping over commercials so easy, Nielsen is now rating commercials themselves, based in part on how often people stop fast-forwarding and watch them. According to a New York Times report, DVRs have also affected show ratings themselves: after a single night, a show like How I Met Your Mother might have a 2.7, but by the end of the week, when everyone with a DVR has watched it, the rating might be much higher, at 4.1. The trouble is, both of these new ratings take weeks to process.
There here are some issues that the article didn’t mention, though. More »
The question of how astronauts go to the bathroom has been answered before (vacuum, thigh clamps, peen tube, in-bowl camera — sounds like a night out at my favourite after-hours) but do you know what happens to the, ahem waste product? Well, according to Col. Chris Hadfield from the Canadian Space Agency, it gets recycled as a shooting star. Details on how to do your ablutions in space after the jump. More »
To fight off the evil empire that is MySpace, tiny entities Facebook and iTunes may be teaming up to bring a musical component to Facebook’s offerings (while offering Apple another venue to sell their music).
According to the unconfirmed rumblings, Facebook is working on expanding their interface. Musical artists will now have special pages with integrated widgets for promoting band events. The upcoming iTunes widget will allow users to sample and even eventually buy music through Facebook (in support beyond the current iLike software). iPod owners who use Facebook will surely take glee in this new integration, but honestly, many of us avoid MySpace like the plague because it’s full of a bunch of losers with crappy bands. Now all those losers with crappy bands are going to set up pages on Facebook, find their way into our networks and infiltrate our clean social networking. Not that we’re paranoid or anything. [paidContent via macworld] More »
Samsung has brought out another LCD monitor from its Syncmaster range. The 245T is a 24-inch monitor with PiP (Picture in Picture), PbP (that’s Picture by Picture), and its Motion Picture Acceleration gives better-quality pics. Also featured is HMDI and 5-Video connections. Another pic, plus the price after the jump. More »
Made of metal scrap, the gigantastic 25-feet-long and 5,000-pound-heavy Robohand has enough power to crush a car. This technological terror was shown a few days ago at Robodock 2007 in Amsterdam. Anyone at the festival—a raving orgy of moving metal parts, fire and music, much like Jason’s pants— was able to operate it like Kouji Kabuto. Jump to see a video summary of some of the strange performances, including a brief clip of the hand itself. More »
Steampunk fever still seems to be tootling along, as this modded computer shows. More pictures are on the English Russia blog. Nice rug, dudes, really ties the room together. [English Russia]
Transcend has added to their popular StoreJet line with a new 160GB external HDD. The product does not do too badly in the looks department either, with brushed aluminium cases in gray, silver, blue or red. A SATA interface offers transfer rates of a reportedly optimistic 480Mbits/s. More »
